Undone

Once upon a time, I decided to stop knitting something because it was bad for me.  I was unable to convince myself to rip out the project, so I stuffed it in a drawer.

It sat in the drawer for about six months.  I'd like to tell you that I didn't think about it, but I did.  I'd like to tell you that I gave up on a project that made me crazy, but I didn't.

This weekend I went to a knit shop and bought a pair of Addi Lace needles in size 6.  I went home, took out the project, and started work on it again.  "A poor worker always blames her tools" kept running through my head.  I tried to ignore it.

It went well for a few rows, but then I found I was off a few stitches in one section.  I couldn't figure out where the mistake was.  Often, when I have problems like this, I can fudge things by knitting stitches together or adding stitches to get back up to the correct count.  That doesn't work with this project because certain stitches are dropped.  If you drop one that you've used to knit two stitches together, that second stitch just floats loose and everything goes very, very badly.

I struggled with it for a long time.  Then I admitted that I was going to have to start over, a fact that pained me because of the hours I'd already spent with my tiny, four inches of lace and because I remembered how long it took me to do the provisional cast on.  I steeled myself, pulled out the needles and began ripping.

Except that the lace didn't rip.  I had already noticed that dropped stitches tended to not drop with this yarn.  I had to force them to drop because the yarn was... sticky for lack of a better word.  The yarn is wool, but it's slightly fuzzy and sticks to itself a bit like mohair.

I tried pulling the yarn while Andrew held it, but it kept sticking.

Then it started breaking apart.  After it had broken in three places and I still wasn't anywhere close to getting it unraveled, I wadded it up and threw it back in the drawer.

Now I'm looking at lace patterns.  Maybe there's another rectangular stole....